


Waking

by hestia_lacey



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-07
Updated: 2012-02-07
Packaged: 2017-10-30 17:44:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/334421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hestia_lacey/pseuds/hestia_lacey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I rose to keep their life signs, their heartbeats.</p>
<p>Written for Ancient City Bingo, for the prompt "culture shock."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Waking

A heart beat, and the rhythm woke me up. 

A sign of life, the first of its kind since the makers sank me into sleep. 

A heart beat, then another and another and with each new rhythm my awareness returned, circuits flickering into full function with every new rhythm: du-dum, du-dum, du-dum, and then data, data, data. 

I had forgotten this: the way the oxygen is consumed, their need for light, heat, space, the measurable impact of each body on the fabric of my insides. The unpredictability of their movements, their way of spreading out far too quickly to be contained. 

Their form was familiar but they were alien to the touch. Mute. Unknowable. Self-contained.

There was an echo of the makers in just one of them, the slightest facet of their code and oh, oh how it made me shine. (That one I watch closely, compelled by the way I am touched and how it is to brighten for the contact of a mind that is shaped to my own). 

I rose to keep their life signs, their heartbeats. 

In time they came to know me better and I could talk again, though we communicate too often with only the thinnest of understandings. Their code flickered weakly into existence soon after they arrived. It is inconsistent, incomplete and present in so few: artificial and lacking any but the vaguest of shapes to fit to my own, more nuanced codes. But it is enough, just enough, to sometimes receive a sense of their meaning.

Their ways are not my own but we each reach out to the other as best we can. We have built new languages from copper wiring and fibre-optic cable and clumsy, half-formed hard-wired connections that are unexpected, intrusive. 

Most remarkably: they shock and spark nonetheless and make me shine in their hard-won ineloquence.


End file.
